Content sharing services serve content, such as pictures, videos, text, or combinations thereof, to visitors who access the content sharing service. The content may be sourced from a publisher, automatically generated, or uploaded by one of the visitors to the content sharing service. The content may be represented as digitally encoded information. The content sharing service may store the content, or link to other services and subsequently retrieve the content prior to serving the content to the visitors.
The visitor may employ various techniques to access the content. For example, the visitor may access the content sharing service through a browser. In another example, the visitor may access the content sharing service via an application installed on a mobile device. The visitor may use any sort of device enabled to interact with the content sharing service, such as a personal computer, mobile phone, or an Internet enabled television, for example.
The content sharing service may serve shared content along with the content. The shared content may be served before, during, or after the serving of the content. The shared content may be associated with meta information, and when the shared content is clicked-through by a user, the user may be redirected to additional content associated with the shared content. The shared content may provide information associated with a product or service related to the content.
The content sharing service may monetize serving the shared content. Specifically, the content sharing service may monetize whether the visitor clicked-through the shared content.
In certain instances, the shared content may be provided along with a function to bypass the shared content. The content sharing service may provide the function to bypass the shared content in order to prevent the visitor from being served shared content the visitor is not interested in. Thus, by maintaining the visitor's interest, the visitor is incentivized to maintain access to the content sharing service. The visitor may click-through on shared content, and the content sharing service may monetize the click-through.
The content sharing service may serve related content based on the content the visitor is presently consuming. The content sharing service may employ other heuristics to determine which related content items to present. The related content items may be presented as thumbnail images or mosaics in a layout determined by the content sharing service's implementation, a visitor preference, or the visitor's device/browser. A mosaic is an icon in which a moving image is presented to the viewer of the mosaic. The content sharing service may serve a predefined number of related content thumbnails.
The related content serves to maintain the visitor's access to the content sharing service. The related content, being tangentially related to the presently served content, may encourage the visitor to click-through and access the related content. This is based on the rationale that the visitor showed interest in the presently served content, and thus, may show interest in a related content item. Thus, by incentivizing the visitor to maintain access to the content sharing service, the visitor's probability of clicking through shared content increases. In the situations where the content sharing service monetizes serving shared content, the content sharing service may realize greater revenue by serving related content thumbnails.